The Libertarian party has never been particularly libertarian (I discovered that when I briefly worked for them back in the '80s).
For a while there, through the 90s, the libertarian movement in the US was still relatively libertarian, which is to say, advocates for the liberty of each and all, and it was fairly common to see a distinction made between “libertarians” - advocates of the ideology - and “Libertarians” - followers of the party, who were pretty much just misled idealists and the opportunists who were misleading them.
That all started to change with 9/11 and the Bush presidency, as the movement as a whole started shifting toward right-wing authoritarianism and the party stopped pretending that it had ever been anything else.
Even then though, there was still a vestige of true libertarianism here and there.
That ended though when the GOP co-opted the Tea Party movement and transformed it from a series of protests against Bush’s Wall Street bailouts to a traveling right-wing carnival of hate. Virtually overnight, any pretense that US libertarians valued individual liberty (other than their own) entirely vanished, and the few remaining genuine advocates of liberty abandoned the movement.
At this point, the US libertarian movement as a whole has morphed entirely into an especially toxic version of right-wing authoritarianism, and I would fully expect them to support whoever seems most likely to let them shoot people. And that’s Trump.
It’s not surprising at all.
The Libertarian party has never been particularly libertarian (I discovered that when I briefly worked for them back in the '80s).
For a while there, through the 90s, the libertarian movement in the US was still relatively libertarian, which is to say, advocates for the liberty of each and all, and it was fairly common to see a distinction made between “libertarians” - advocates of the ideology - and “Libertarians” - followers of the party, who were pretty much just misled idealists and the opportunists who were misleading them.
That all started to change with 9/11 and the Bush presidency, as the movement as a whole started shifting toward right-wing authoritarianism and the party stopped pretending that it had ever been anything else.
Even then though, there was still a vestige of true libertarianism here and there.
That ended though when the GOP co-opted the Tea Party movement and transformed it from a series of protests against Bush’s Wall Street bailouts to a traveling right-wing carnival of hate. Virtually overnight, any pretense that US libertarians valued individual liberty (other than their own) entirely vanished, and the few remaining genuine advocates of liberty abandoned the movement.
At this point, the US libertarian movement as a whole has morphed entirely into an especially toxic version of right-wing authoritarianism, and I would fully expect them to support whoever seems most likely to let them shoot people. And that’s Trump.